Blizzard Announces Changes to Legend Rank Starting Next Season
by hsdecktech - 6 years ago show comments
In response to the recent community complaints (from professionals and non-professionals alike), Blizzard has announced upcoming ladder changes and explained a bit about why Legend-ranked players have been facing non-Legends more frequently in recent months. Essentially, ladder has been working as designed, but an unintended consequence of having more people reach Legend each month was that losing games hurt a lot more, especially at the lower end of the Legend ladder, where players can get stuck in a downward spiral playing against non-Legend players.
Starting in July, it will be harder for Legend players to be paired against non-Legend players, hopefully making for better play experiences for Legend players and non-Legend players alike. Check out the official post and then let us know what you think about the changes in the comments below.
Some players have been raising concerns that matchmaking at Legend ranks isn’t working properly. Please rest assured that we have not changed the matchmaking calculations since our 10.2 update. However, the Ranked Play update from 10.2 did result in an increased number of people reaching Legend, and their matchmaking values being much closer together.
With a tighter distribution of matchmaking ratings, losing games at lower Legend ranks can result in a matchmaking rating significantly worse than non-Legend players. Once a Legend player has a low matchmaking rating, it can become difficult for them to gain ranks.
Ranked Play is very important to us, and we’ve been watching this situation very closely as it has evolved since March. To help improve the Legend rank experience, we are changing how Legend players get matched against non-Legend players, starting with our July Ranked Play Season. With that change, Legend players will have to lose significantly more games before matching against a non-Legend player.
Additional changes to Ranked Play will be coming later this year, and those should also help to improve the experience. We’ll provide more details when those features are closer to release.
Thanks for your continued support of Hearthstone, and we’ll see you in the Tavern.
Cheers!
